wwii – Radio Free

The Truth About The Jews, The Christians, and The Palestinians

Eric Zuesse — Sat, 17 May 2025 21:24:44 +0000

This article might offend everybody, but the links here are to the sources, and all of its sources are not only authentic when they are primary, but are true when they are secondary. (I have checked-out all sources within each secondary source that I link to.) Individuals who disagree with something here but don’t click onto the link to the documentation when they disagree, are not open-minded; and, for me, the first obligation is to be constantly open-minded, because only in that way can truths be discovered, and falsehoods become identified and replaced with truths. So: I open here by admitting that I am not bothered, at all, if I lose a closed-minded reader. I don’t want them, though I find that a majority of people are closed-minded. I instead look for readers who are (like I am): always seeking evidence to change one’s view of things whenever that view is false.

That is the Introduction.

*****

The most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian countries — America and its European colonies — are so blind to the evilness of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the residents of Gaza, and of its ongoing and accelerating land-thefts from the Palestinians in the West Bank, as to present the serious question of why these massive ongoing evils, which are of historic magnitude, are absent from their Governments’ official condemnations and (until recently) almost completely absent from these countries’ news-reports, even as-if these horrors weren’t being perpetrated by Israel with America’s weapons and satellite guidance and targeting, or weren’t even happening at all. There is a real blindness about the blindness, as if this tolerance of Israel’s (and America’s) genocide and land-theft against Palestinians simply were not so. But it is. What explains the blindness and the blindness about the blindness — the utter refusal — to acknowledge the evilness of Israel (and of the U.S. Government ever since Harry Truman created the state of Israel in 1948, even when the genocidal intent of Israel’s founders was already known both privately and publicly)?

Stupidity — believing the Israeli Government’s lies — is part of the answer. Especially the lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew is obvious to everyone but idiots, because many Jews are anti-Israel — even some rabbis, both in America and in Israel, are against Israel — and this means that the equation between “Jew” and “Zionist” (supporter of Israel) is false. Only stupid people would believe it. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration and many throughout the world spout Israel’s lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew (an “anti-Semite”); and, for example, prestigious American universities have expelled students for speaking publicly against Israel’s slaughter of Gazans — and the U.S. Government, despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (which prohibits the Government’s suppressing public expressions of political opinions), has halted federal funds to universities that DON’T expel such students.

However, even the opponents of that lie falsify, by alleging that the Jewish religion does not support this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Here are a few examples from the Jewish religion’s alleged ‘holy texts’ or Scriptures, specifically referring to what their ‘God’ wants:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land the Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends not to be a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation, a nation ruled by billionaires instead of by mere voters) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.

Israel, therefore, does represent Judaism’s mythological god by doing to the Gazans what it is doing to them, and also doing to Palestinians in the West Bank what it is doing to them. Self-alleged Jews — including some rabbis — who say otherwise (that Judaism isn’t intrinsically racist and even genocidally so), are clearly lying about the Jewish religion, by saying that being a follower of the Jewish religion does NOT necessarily entail being a Zionist. Though Zionism, as a political movement, started only with Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish Nation in 1896, Zionism had been an intrinsic part of the Jewish faith ever since that faith’s Scripture, the Torah, which includes those passages, which Israel is now trying to finalize in both Gaza and the West Bank (and a bit beyond), which Scripture became Judaism’s Torah, or ultimate holy Scripture, at some time during the 6th-5th Century BC. Since that time, every Jewish assembly place or synagogue has had a Torah. It is the basis of the Jewish religion, and before that, Jews were simply tribes.

Judaism’s hatred of, and desire to destroy, the Palestinians is as old as the faith itself. For this reason, as I headlined on 14 August 2017, “Netanyahu’s Pro-Nazi Lie: ‘Hitler Wanted To Expel The Jews’“: Netanyahu blamed Palestinians — NOT Christians — for the Holocaust. Despite Hitler himself having been a Catholic, and that Church having held a solemn private (but attended by Bormann and Goebbels) Memorial Mass for him, on 6 May 1945, a week after his suicide. Hitler was born, lived, and died, as a Catholic.

However, there is nothing unique about Judaism’s racism. Consider, for example, the Christians, not just Hitler but all of the Nazi leaders, and the 94% of Germans in that time who called themselves “Christian”:

The Catholic-raised Hitler took very seriously such anti-Semitic New-Testament statements as, from ‘Jesus,’ John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and Luke 19:27; and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16. (Hitler even said to his followers on 18 December 1926, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against the Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” Then, on 26 April 1933, he told the Pope’s representative, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.”) All of that was Christian racism against Jews. Furthermore, virtually all of Germany’s Nazis were Christians — committed to the New Testament — and, in fact, that (an applicant’s purebred Christianity) was a requirement in order to join the Party, and ESPECIALLY in order to join the SS, as is documented in a 13,000-word masterpiece of an article by Coel Hellier, on “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism,” which can leave no intelligent reader to doubt that the Nazi Party was itself a Christian movement, which historical fact is covered-up by ‘journalists’ and ‘historians’ (but exposed and documented by the primary sources cited in that article — they’re all authentic).

In addition to this: On 21 October 1941, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker, concluded a long tirade against Jews (as transcribed in his Table-Talk) by saying: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” Hitler’s buddy, Himmler, stated, in a speech to top SS leaders, two years later, when the Holocaust was in full swing, on 4 October 1943, that this extermination was necessary for them to carry out, in order to have “exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” Hitler had stated, on various occasions, that the “Jewish infection” or “Jewish bacterium” or “blood-poisoning by Jews,” was transmitted to non-Jews in their “blood,” and so Jews must be entirely eradicated like plague-carrying rats — not only in Germany, but beyond. Hitler said, on 24 February 1943: “This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan [which to him meant the descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 — and the snake was, according to the NT, the father of the Jews] but with the extermination of the Jew [which to him meant the descendants of the snake in Genesis 3] in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people.” (Yet,still, there are Holocaust-deniers who say that it is just ‘a Jewish hoax’, or that if it happened, Hitler didn’t know about it.) Or, as Hitler stated it in his last official words, his “Political Testament” right before his suicide: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” (His phrase “international Jewry” referred to Jews in all nations. He didn’t make any explicit reference here to exterminating them, because this statement from him was intended to be public — not merely private.)

Furthermore, that 24 February 1943 quotation ISN’T from the flawed Trevor-Roper publication of the Table-Talk but instead from an authentic speech that Hitler gave on that date, and the varying translations of which were discussed in an 8 March 1943 OSS Memorandum by Walter Langer to William Donovan. The 1941 quotation from Hitler isn’t only in the original German version of the Table-Talk but was quoted in a book by Winston Churchill in 1948, four years before any translated version of the Table-Talks (Tischgesprache) (and this includes the one issued by Trevor-Roper) was published. The Himmler quotation is likewise accepted as authentic by historians.

Moreover, Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his excellent 1973 The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (p. 171), that “railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.” And, according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany’s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.”

And, as I pointed out in my 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up (see summary of it here), Hitler said that “Aryans” have remained unchanged since the time God first created Man (Adam and Eve). Thus, Mein Kampf asserted that the objective was “to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them.” Though during his later years Hitler was trying to adopt a scientific view, he failed, and Hitler even in his war bunker on the night of 25 January 1942, confided that Darwinian evolution does not apply to Man, who “has always been as he is now.” This was NOT an atheistic type of racism; it was SPECIFICALLY Biblical, a religious type of racism, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary (which has fooled almost all of the Hitler ‘experts’ ever since — though the evidence proves the contrary to be true).

Consequently, it will be good here to quote the most important New Testament origins of Hitler’s — and other Christians’ — Holocaust:

John 8:44

“You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father’s desires. From the very beginning, he was a murderer, and has never been on the side of truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.”

Matthew 23:31-38

“So, you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started. You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape being condemned to hell? And so I will tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town too town. As a result, the punishment for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you. … The punishment for all of these murders will fall on the people of this day!”

Luke: 19:27

“Now, as for all those enemies of mine who did not want me to be their king, bring them here, and kill them in my presence!” (This is told as the closing line of a parable.)

Paul 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

“You suffered the same persecutions from your own countrymen that they suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! How hostile they are to everyone! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. In this way, they have completed the full total of the sins they have always committed. And now God’s anger has at last come down on them!”

To put those passages into their true historical context: Paul never met nor heard the living Jesus but wrote the earliest of all documents that came to be canonized in the year 393 by the Roman Catholic Church and later by all other Christian churches; and his followers wrote the four canonical Gospel-accounts of ‘the words of Jesus’ but even in their time Jesus’s having been a rabbi who preached Judaism (NOT Christianity) was so well known so that 3 out of the 4 canonized Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ mentioned specifically that his disciples sometimes addressed him simply as “rebbi” rabbi: Matthew 23:7, 23:8, 26:25, 26:49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 3:26, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, and 11:8. They could not deny it, because to have tried would have been too obviously false and thus Paul’s new religion would have been recognized for what it actually was, not as they wanted it to become — they were evangelists for Paul’s religion, which they believed to be true because Paul told them that it was.

As I documented in my 2012 Christs’s Ventriloquists, Paul created Christianity in the year 49 0r 50 in order to get back at Jesus’s brother James who then headed the former Jesus-created sect of Jews and finally decided that the by-then thousands of uncircumcised men in Paul’s congregations would either be circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 or else be expelled from the sect. That is the reason why Christianity is anti-Jewish (anti-Semitic): James finally decided to enforce Genesis 17:14 (in that age when no such things as anesthetics nor antibiotics existed — and circumcision was therefore almost always perpetrated upon only infants, who didn’t volunteer for it and whose screams adults didn’t take seriously).

As regards the Christian clergy, they very predominantly supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and they even provided to his Government the documentation as to whom was and therefore also whom was NOT a Christian — the basic data from which the Holocaust’s “Jews” would be selected for extermination:

Eberhard Bethge, who had been a liberal Protestant cleric during the Third Reich, was interviewed in the last chapter of Augustin Hedberg’s 1992 Faith under Fire and was asked what those years had been like. Bethge commented, “‘Bad blood’ was the great term. You had to have Aryan blood.” Hitler, in only his private statements, had defined “Aryan,” as pureblooded Christian. Bethge’s interviewer inquired, “So we know this Jewish poison [Jewish blood] had to be cleansed. How did they propose to do that?” Bethge replied, tellingly: “For instance, everybody in an office, in a village, in a city, in a province, in Berlin, had to prove that he had [only] Aryan ancestors. How could he do that? He could do it only if he wrote to church officers in the villages or in the cities and asked them to look in the old books of the church in which baptisms were recorded. So many pastors and church secretaries had to work for hours and hours, weeks and months to answer all these requests. ‘Please give me an excerpt out of the church files that proves my ancestors had been Christians.’ The church officers and the ministers, they didn’t care. They did that. They said, ‘How important we are now.’ I was an assistant curator in the winter of ’33. I had to sit all morning and look through the books and answer these letters.” It was therefore the Christian clergy themselves — people indoctrinated with John 8:44, and Matthew 27:25, and Matthew 23:31-36, and Luke 19:27, etc. — who were the proud implementers of the indispensable first step in the Nazis’ 12-year-long “racist” war against the Jews, by supplying the crucial raw data for segregating-out Jews. Bethge was even honest enough to admit, “We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this was Christian.” (Of course, they did, because it was, and they had absorbed this from Christianity’s Scripture.) The essential first step in the “final solution” was this identification of who was NOT an “Aryan,” who WAS “a Jew.” Hitler commanded this first step in the year he came into power, 1933, and the Christian clergy executed it with pride. And yet even today, so-called “historians” say that Hitler didn’t have execution of the Jews in mind from the very start, and that Hitler was no Christian, and so forth.

“Historians” have not been doing their job, for the truth. That’s why the general public cannot separate propaganda from history —the latter is just an extension of the former.

Compare this account of the origin off how the Nazis managed to identify who was “a Jew” and who was not, that was given in a traditional history book on that topic, Edwin Black’s 2001 IBM and the Holocaust. Christianity’s role is ignored.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

There is a Big Lie, and, this time, it comes not from Germany’s racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist (or ideologically Nazi) Nazi Party and all the rest of Christendom, but instead from Judaism’s own racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist Zionists and all the rest of Judaism.

And what about Islam’s equivalent? That is the jihadists, the fundamentalist Arab Sunni (U.S. propaganda lies that it’s instead fundamentalist Iranian Shiite) movement that includes both al-Qaeda and ISIS and whose former leader in Iraq and Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Donald Trump made a deal with on May 14 for Syria to become a U.S. colony. Now this former al-Qaeda and then ISIS leader — whom both Obama and Biden, and also Trump, had protected ever since 2012 — has finally succeeded (with U.S.-supplied weapons and training) at overthrowing Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad, and started the ethnic cleansing in Syria against Shiite Muslims and Christians there (that isn’t being reported in the U.S. empire).

The post The Truth About The Jews, The Christians, and The Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Committees of Correspondence

Dan Lieberman — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:42:00 +0000

Early in life, I learned of the deliberate manner by which Zionists confuse the public and frame the Middle East conflicts to favor them. Commentators have gone to great length to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, treating it as a unique affair, in which both benefit. This slogan is a hoax, which originated during World War II as a description of the relationship between embattled Great Britain and a still neutral United States. Somehow and somewhere, a clever someone adapted the World War II slogan to Israel and managed to insert the relationship into the everyday activities of several western nations.

I witnessed Israeli immigrants inviting fellow workers to their homes and lecturing them on why they should support Israel. I know of them going to synagogues and urging the Rabbis to place the Israeli flag next to the American flag, which is now de rigeur. Contracts are given to Israeli organizations and company secrets are funneled to Israeli organizations.

In public schools, efforts are made to gain support for Israel by emphasis on the World War II Holocaust (nothing on the Nakba), and with events organized to attack Israel’s adversaries. I saw students brought to a school library for them to choose general biographies to read, seven out of ten were of personalities from the World War II Holocaust. One librarian, and behaving nervously, showed her ignorance of the topic by referring to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg as a Nazi officer who helped the Jews. The World War II Holocaust has a vital place in history, but treating it as a purposeful commodity demeans the lost lives. The Free Darfur movement, accused of alliance with Israeli interests due to Israel’s enmity toward Sudan at that time, organized public school demonstrations against Sudan for purported genocide. Local synagogues advertised the action.

I knew of everyday U.S. citizens acting as research centers for Israel, accumulating social, political and economic statistics on American industrial and commercial life and sending it to Israel ─ unregistered foreign agents whose activities are illegal. Students and visiting professors from Israel arrive with more concerns than learning. I have noticed them at university conferences countering Palestinian expressions of grievances with statements such as, “The West Bank roads that Israel is building are meant to serve Palestinians one day,” and then congregate after the meeting to discuss what they can do to counter the remarks made at the meeting. A visiting professor to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, who was denied using his grant to teach Holocaust studies, sued the university for anti-Semitism and won his case. St. Cloud now has a Jewish Studies and Resources Center but no courses, only a document center.

Georgetown, and many other universities, has a Center for Jewish Civilization (what is Jewish civilization?) that has one principal core course: INAF-1990: Introduction to Jewish Civilization. “This course provides a foundation for the study of Jewish civilization,” which can be taught in five seconds — no known unique contributions to civilization by a Jewish community, maybe by individuals, but not as a community. This Center for Jewish Civilization has periodic meetings, open to the public whose topics have nothing to do with any Jewish civilization and have much to do with Israel ─ real reason for its existence. Most talks are on the World War II Holocaust, Jewish Israel, and the almost non-existent anti-Semitism. No talks on Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers. No talks on past Jewish life in Spain, Tunisia, Iraq, and Europe.

Political, “think tank,” peace, and cultural organizations in Washington, D.C. are unusually populated with Israelis and Israel supporters. One route that I have noticed is where a person obtains credentials from an Israeli institute, is awarded a grant to visit the United states by a sketchy organization, eventually receives an invitation (by a friend) to lecture at a university and becomes recognized as an expert on the Middle East. This leads to a recommendation for a fellowship at a Middle East “think tank,” more recognition, and soon we have an artificially prepared “Middle East expert” who ingratiates with peace groups and tries to steer everyone, including those at the institutions and universities, to lessen aggressive attitudes toward Israel. Nothing too extreme, only a neutralization of activity.

Repetitions of the biblical David and Goliath story, the mythical Exodus, the fictional novel and Hollywood fabricated film called Exodus, and the moribund Kibbutzim presentations, with their Airbnb rental agents posing as sturdy farmers, make it difficult to ascertain if Israel is a country or a public relations stunt. The many organizations that perpetuate the myths and influence parliamentary bodies to favor Israel have no equivalents in the international scene. They have enabled Israel’s oppression and diabolical nature ─ the daily killings of Palestinians, land seizures, and heartless evictions. Number one on the agenda of those who recognize and oppose Israel’s nefarious activities is combating the deception, infiltration, and the global army of pro-Israel groups. This has gained momentum but has not changed the trajectory ─ extermination of the Palestinian people.

Too few know much; too many know little. A coordinated and bludgeoning effort, which shoves the truth into the corner pocket of each person’s billiard mind, which rouses the intellect against those who promote the genocide, and provokes people to act, is a beckoning enterprise. A central source that disburses “talking points,” that distributes knowledge, that provides access to information and rebuttals to disinformation will fill a gap. Knowing where to go and learning what to say are vital factors for combatting the deceptions that Israel’s supporters offer. The Palestinian movement needs committees of correspondence.

The original committees of correspondence “were a collection of American political organizations that sought to coordinate opposition to British Parliament and, later, support for American independence during the American Revolution. The brainchild of Samuel Adams, the committees sought to establish, through the writing of letters, an underground network of communication among Patriot leaders in the Thirteen Colonies.”

Working above ground, in every available space of planet Earth, in every hallway of parliamentary governments, and in every airspace that allows breaths and sounds, a new network of committees of correspondence will distribute reliable and decisive information that answers questions and proves Israel is a criminal activity, is engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people, engages supporters who are partners to crimes, and bribes legislative supporters who are traitors to their peoples. The organizations will convey specific information and provoke constant talks — in homes, at scheduled meetings, at online forums, in schools, churches, libraries, in every inch of public space. Daily demonstrations and protests throughout the universe will accompany the mass distribution of information.

Too much to chew on for the moment. Part II of this excursion into freeing the world of the Zionist menace will detail the method of organization and the contents of the information. Details will shortly appear.

The post Committees of Correspondence first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Unexploded WWII bombs plague Palau amid US military build-up

Harry Pearl for BenarNews — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:37:26 +0000

Read this story at BenarNews

PELELIU, Palau — Palauan Sharla Paules surveys the contaminated ground of her lush tropical home island of Peleliu, still littered with WWII munitions 80 years after its liberation from the Japanese.

She recalls as a child her grandmother warning the land was poisoned by unexploded bombs, disrupting almost every aspect of traditional life on the island.

“They said after the war the soil was so contaminated they couldn’t even plant food,” said Paules, 49, who is part of a team clearing the island for the mine action group Norwegian People’s Aid.

“They couldn’t plant bananas, taro, tapioca or soursop. You still can’t plant tapioca and eat it here, it’s really bad.”

Roger Hess, a member of the mine action group Norwegian People’s Aid, holds a Type 91 grenade used by the Japanese military during WWII on the island of Peleliu, Palau, Nov. 26, 2024.

(Harry Pearl/BenarNews)

The United States fired more than 2,800 tons of munitions from the air and naval vessels on the Japanese-occupied island before making an amphibious assault in 1944.

Nearly 2,000 Americans, 10,000 Japanese and an unknown number of Palauans died in the ensuing battle.

Today, much of Peleliu’s southern edge is still littered with unexploded munitions, rusting tanks and soldiers’ skeletal remains. It’s a stark reminder of a Pacific-wide problem: the lingering legacy of unexploded and abandoned ordnance, also known as UXO/AXO.

Paules’ colleague Roger Hess picks up a rusting Japanese grenade from the floor of the jungle while taking BenarNews on a tour of clearance work on the island.

“We’ll come back and recover it. It’s technically still live,” said the 65-year-old American army veteran, brushing off the dirt and marking it with white spray paint for later removal.

Roger Hess, right, and a member of the Norwegian People’s Aid clearance team inspect an abandoned WWII munition on Umurbrogal Mountain in Peleliu, Palau, Nov. 26, 2024.

(Harry Pearl/BenarNews)

Hess is the Palau operations manager for Norwegian People’s Aid and is preparing a clearance operation in the upper reaches of Umurbrogal Mountain, a series of jagged, jungle-covered coral ridges that was one of the main battlegrounds on Peleliu.

The Type 91 grenade held by Hess is not an unusual find in Palau.

“The fuse may not function, but if you put it in a fire it will blow,” he said.

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The Micronesian nation is one of nine Pacific island countries contaminated by an unknown quantity of explosive weapons left behind by Japanese and Allied forces after WWII.

Although international awareness about the issue in the Pacific is lower than in landmine and cluster munitions hotspots like Cambodia or Africa’s Sahel region, experts say potentially lethal munitions are scattered across the region’s lagoons, beaches and jungles.

A Norwegian People’s Aid makeshift storage depot for unexploded ordnance is made up of sandbags, rotting wooden pallets and barbed wire in Peleliu, Palau, Nov. 26, 2024.

(Harry Pearl/BenarNews)

These explosive remnants of war threaten not just human life, but can pollute water sources, hinder infrastructure development and leave land too dangerous to farm.

“Palau has not had an accident in decades, but that doesn’t mean there is no potential for it,” said Hess.

“Just look at the amount of munitions we’re pulling out; any of those mishandled can kill people.”

A deadly menace

Palau may not have seen a casualty for some time, but other parts of the Pacific have not been so lucky.

In the Solomon Islands, which witnessed heavy combat between Japanese and Allied forces on the main island of Guadalcanal, two young men died in 2021 when an American 105 mm shell exploded in a residential area of the capital Honiara.

U.S. Marines move up to the front lines over terrain denuded by the bombardment of Peleliu to mop-up Japanese forces, Oct. 12, 1944.

(AP)

At the time of their deaths, Raziv Hilly and Charles Noda were part of a group cooking over a backyard fire pit without realising the WWII-era projectile was buried beneath the ground.

While media reports occasionally highlight the deadly threat, there are no formal systems in place to track accidents or gather comprehensive data on the extent of contamination in Pacific island nations, according to nongovernmental organizations.

In 2012, the Pacific Island Forum, PIF, endorsed a regional UXO strategy that aimed to mobilize and coordinate efforts to tackle the problem.

But according to people familiar with the plan, after an initial burst of energy, including two regional conferences in Palau and the Australian city of Brisbane, little progress has been made in recent years.

The PIF did not immediately respond to BenarNews requests for an update on the strategy.

Remnants of World War II in Palau.

(AFP)

Experts say that poor data collection and coordination is preventing Pacific island governments from combating the deadly menace, including accessing international assistance.

“There’s a lack of knowledge that this is important information that can help get funding to deal with the problem long term,” said Mette Eliseussen, national coordinator at Australian nonprofit SafeGround, which has done extensive surveys and clearance across the Pacific.

Historically, Pacific states have also been disadvantaged because international funding for ERW action is driven by two international treaties that cover landmines and cluster munitions, neither of which were used widely in the Pacific in WWII.

“Because they have UXO, [donors] have sort of said, ‘Oh, you don’t have a landmine problem, so we will discriminate against you.’ That’s been the attitude until just recently,” Eliseussen told BenarNews.

Palauan Sharla Paules is part of NPA’s survey and clearance team in Peleliu, pictured on Nov. 26, 2024.

(Harry Pearl/BenarNews)

In 2023, the Pacific region saw an increase in funding for clearance of ERW. The U.S., Australia and Japan raised financial support for Solomon Islands and Palau, and made new investments in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, according to the 2024 report produced by the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor.

Eliseussen said geopolitical “tension with China” partly explained the renewed attention and additional resources for the problem in the Pacific.

Last year on Peleliu, U.S. Marines completed a $400 million rehabilitation of a WWII-era Japanese airfield, including removing UXOs at the site. It will allow fixed-wing aircraft to operate to enhance the U.S. military’s strategic capabilities in response to China’s ambitions in the South China Sea and Pacific region.

Between 2021 and 23, the U.S. Department of State provided Solomon Islands with $4.5 million for clearance, $1.5 million for Palau and smaller amounts for Marshall Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

John Rodsted, a researcher at SafeGround, said international donors like the U.S., Australia and Japan needed to step up assistance to rid the Pacific of UXOs and take a long-term approach to funding.

He added that the Japanese in particular “should put their hands in their pockets and actually help clear this stuff up.”

Contaminated soil

Since NPA began survey and clearance in Palau in 2016, it has found 10,844 ERW scattered across the country, according to its records.

Hess could not say if Peleliu – with a population of about 500 people – would ever be free of ERW, but based on the ferocity of fighting there were “probably still around 100 suspected hazardous areas.”

A member of the clearance team from the mine action group Norwegian People’s Aid peers into an American tank abandoned after WWII in Peleliu, Palau, Nov. 26, 2024.

(Harry Pearl/BenarNews)

On a recent survey of Umurbrogal Mountain, the detritus of war was obvious to see – mortars, rockets and shells dotted the ground.

Weeks earlier, NPA staff found the remnants of a suspected landmine outside a cave while accompanying Japanese personnel searching for soldiers’ remains, Hess said.

“The biggest threat to public safety are white phosphorus munitions that were fired from 81 mm mortars,” he said, referring to the incendiary weapons that ignite on contact with oxygen.

Not everything discovered is hazardous, but such items are marked with yellow-tipped stakes and white spray paint and their GPS coordinates recorded for retrieval later that day.

After the munitions are collected, they are moved to a makeshift storage facility near the Peleliu’s trash heap, then transported to a disposal site on the nearby state of Koror, where they are cut open and burned out.

The work is slow going – and decades late – but according to locals like Paules, it’s starting to make a difference.

“When I was little, we saw a lot of [munitions] on the side of the street. Nowadays we don’t see so much,” she said.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII

Tik Root — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Solar accounted for most of the capacity the nation added to its electric grids last year. That feat marks the first time since World War II, when hydropower was booming, that a renewable power source has comprised more than half of the nation’s energy additions.

“It’s really monumental,” said Shawn Rumery, senior director of research at the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA. The trade group announced the 2023 numbers in a report released today with analytics firm Wood MacKenzie. The 32.4 gigawatts that came online in the United States last year shattered the previous high of 23.6 gigawatts recorded in 2021 and accounted for 53 percent of new capacity. Natural gas was next in line at a distant 18 percent.

SEIA called 2023 the best year for renewables since the Second World War. Texas and California led a solar surge driven mostly by utility-scale installations, which jumped 77 percent year-over-year to 22.5 gigawatts. The residential and commercial sectors also reached new milestones. Only the relatively nascent community solar market missed its previous mark, though not by much, said Rumery. Overall he called it an “almost record-setting year across the industry.”

One factor driving all that growth was an easing of supply chain constraints, which had slowed the delivery of solar panels. The problem arose in early 2022 after a small California manufacturer, Auxin Solar, filed a petition with the Department of Commerce accusing Chinese companies of circumventing U.S. tariffs by funneling panels through Southeast Asia. The government largely sided with Auxin, and new tariffs are set to take effect in June.

The dispute “really set back a lot of utility-scale projects,” said Rumery. But, he explained, solar developers found workarounds that helped foster such strong 2023 growth, when projects slated to finish in 2022 finally wrapped up. While the boost from delayed installations will dissipate in coming years, and residential solar faces headwinds due to changes in net metering rules, experts generally expect renewable energy to keep on its torrent trajectory.

“It’s very likely to continue because solar and wind are now very well established,” said Rob Stoner, director of the MIT Energy Initiative. “Solar costs continue to fall far below where we ever thought they would.”

The WWII Elitist Reality Show

Allen Forrest — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 16:15:44 +0000

The post The WWII Elitist Reality Show first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Russian Court Rejects Woman’s Appeal Against Arrest Over Video Mocking WWII Monument

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 12:57:19 +0000

Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has died while in prison, according to a statement from the local department of the Federal Penitentiary Service, triggering outrage and condemnation from world leaders who said the Kremlin critic paid the "ultimate price" for his courage to speak out against the country's leadership.

"On February 16, 2024, in penal colony No. 3, convict Aleksei Navalny felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness. The medical staff of the institution arrived immediately, and an ambulance team was called," the statement said.

"All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, which did not yield positive results. Doctors from the ambulance declared the convict dead. The causes of death are being established."

Russian state-controlled media also quoted the statement as saying Navalny, 47, had died.

There was no immediate confirmation of Navalny’s death from his team. According to Russian law, family must be notified within 24 hours if a prisoner dies.

"I don't know if we should believe the terrible news, the news we get only from official media because for many years we have been in the situation where we cannot believe Putin and his government as they are lying constantly," his wife, Yulia, said in a brief statement from Germany where she was attending the Munich Security Conference.

"But if it is the truth, Putin and all his staff and everyone around him need to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our patriot, with my family, and with my husband. They will be brought to justice and this day will come soon," she added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying President Vladimir Putin had been informed of the report of Navalny's death but that he has no official information on the cause of death.

"It's very complicated to confirm the news that comes from a country like Russia," Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte also told RFE/RL as she attended the Munich Security Conference. "But, if you asked me whether I would be surprised if that's true, of course I would not, unfortunately, because we know that the regime in the Kremlin is an assassin regime, basically, who would go after their enemies as they understand it, after people with different opinions on the development of Russia and their relations to the rest of the world."

A day earlier, Navalny did not appear to have any health issues when speaking by video link to a court hearing.

[embedded content]

Navalny spokeswoman Kyra Yarmysh said on X, formerly Twitter, that "we don't have any confirmation of [his death] yet." She added that Navalny's lawyer is now flying to the prison.

"Most likely it is true. Navalny was murdered," said Ivan Zhdanov, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin. "It is a political murder which will for sure be investigated."

As the reports reverberated around the country and around the world, some people laid flowers at the buildings where Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) was headquartered before the government shut it down after labeling the organization "extremist."

Others gathered in front of Russian embassies in countries such as Georgia and Armenia, while vigils were being planned in many cities across Europe.

"If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power, to not give up, to remember we are an enormous power that is being oppressed by these bad people. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive," Navalny said at the end of the Oscar-winning documentary that carried his name.

U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told NPR in an interview just after the news broke that, if confirmed, Navalny's death would be a "terrible tragedy."

"The Russian government's long and sordid history of doing harm to its opponents raises real and obvious questions here.... We are actively seeking confirmation," he added.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Navalny "paid for his courage with his life," while French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said in a post on X that the Kremlin critic's "death in a penal colony reminds us of the reality of Vladimir Putin's regime."

European Council President Charles Michel said Navalny had made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for the "values of freedom and democracy."

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told RFE/RL that Navalny's only crime was to root out "the corruption [and] the thievery of the current Russian elite" and to have a dream of a better Russia that abides by the rule of law, lives in peace with its neighbors, and invests in its people.

"That proved to be an unforgivable crime," Sikorski said, speaking with RFE/RL at the Munich Security Conference. He said the Russian state was responsible for Navalny's life and welfare "and therefore his death is the legal responsibility of the Russian state."

Navalny, who last month marked the third anniversary of his incarceration on charges widely believed to be politically motivated, nearly died from a poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020, which he blamed on Russian security operatives acting at the behest of Putin.

The man who once blasted Putin as "corrupt, cynical" in an interview with RFE/RL was detained on January 17, 2021, at a Moscow airport upon his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for the poisoning.

He was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole during his convalescence abroad. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Navalny's poisoning.

In March 2022, Navalny was handed a nine-year prison term on charges of contempt and embezzlement through fraud that he and his supporters have repeatedly rejected as politically motivated.

Later, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation and his network of regional offices were designated "extremist" organizations and banned after his arrest, which led to another probe against him on extremism charges.

In August last year, a court extended Navalny's prison term to 19 years and sent him to a harsher "special regime" facility from the maximum-security prison where he was held.

Last month, Navalny was transferred to Polar Wolf, which is a "special regime" prison in Russia's Arctic region.

Navalny's death, if confirmed, comes as Putin, who publicly has long refused to actually say Navalny's name, runs for another term facing no real opposition as those who were expected to be his main challengers -- including Navalny -- currently are either incarcerated or have fled the country, fearing for their safety.

Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy.

They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin's tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers means Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, is certain to win, barring a very big, unexpected development.

Navalny married his wife, Yulia, in 2000. The couple has a son and a daughter.

With reporting by Rikard Jozwiak and Vazha Tavberidze in Munich

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Malaysia investigates Chinese ship over looting of British WWII wrecks

By Iman Muttaqin Yusof for BenarNews — Tue, 30 May 2023 17:47:03 +0000

Malaysia said Tuesday it had detained a Chinese-registered ship carrying what is believed to be World War II-era cannon shells and was investigating the vessel’s alleged involvement in the plunder of wreckage from two British warships in the South China Sea.

The bulk carrier, registered in the southeastern Chinese city of Fuzhou, was seized on Sunday after it anchored illegally off the coast of Johor, the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) said.

While inspecting the vessel, maritime authorities discovered rusty cannon shells, scrap metal, bullets and other relics believed to be from World War II.

Discovery of the ammunition comes amid recent reports of scavengers looting two British shipwrecks, the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which were sunk by Japanese torpedoes in 1941.

The 32-member crew – including 21 Chinese, 10 Bangladeshis and a Malaysian – are being questioned at the Tanjung Sedili Maritime Zone, said Nurul Hizam Zakaria, the MMEA director for Johor state.

“We are still investigating and our priority is to obtain statements from the crew members,” he told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service.

Scrap metal and an old cannon shell recovered from a Chinese-registered vessel detained by Malaysian maritime authorities. Credit: MMEA/AP

The maritime agency said it was looking into a possible link with a separate seizure of relics and ammunition from a private scrap yard at Tanjung Belungkor in Johor.

Malaysian newspaper the New Straits Times reported the Johor seizure was believed to be from the British World War II wrecks, which are located about 100 km east of Malaysia in the South China Sea.

“We at the MMEA cannot simply mention the British World War II wrecks because it is not confirmed yet and is still under investigation,” said Zakaria.

Following reports last week, a spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defence told the BBC it condemned the “desecration” of maritime military graves and would take “appropriate action.”

The MMEA, the Royal Malaysian Police and the Department of Malaysian Heritage are investigating the recent seizures.

“Our officers are currently on-site to determine whether these relics are related to British World War II shipwrecks,” deputy head of the heritage department Mohd Muda told BenarNews.

BenarNews has contacted the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur for comment.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Iman Muttaqin Yusof for BenarNews.

No WWII No Victory Parade in Moscow and No War in Ukraine Today If the West Had Not Rearmed Germany!

Jay Janson — Wed, 10 May 2023 18:36:38 +0000

May 9! Moscow Celebrates Victory Over Nazi Germany’s Invasion, but with incomprehensibly little or no public condemnation of American corporations having earlier heavily rearmed Hitler’s Nazi Germany as British and French armies stood down in cooperation and in violation of the Versailles Treaty’s prohibition of German rearmament.

With the world of the plundering Colonial Powers deep in the chaos of the Great Depression, a disastrous failure of rule by the banks of the capitalist countries and the United States internally threatened by local organizations of socialists and communists, US capital flowed into weaponizing Nazis.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Was Seen as a Model for Revolutionaries Everywhere

Except for the socialist Soviet Union, the suffering engendered by the Great Depression was world-wide. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. Meanwhile, the prospering revolutionary Soviet Union had become an inspiration and model for revolutionary organizing against capitalism and colonialism across the world. By 1928, the Soviet Union had made an amazingly rapid recovery from the ravages of the First World War and from a horrible war on the domestic front promoted by invasions of twelve capitalist nations. However, its agricultural production had not recovered from war’s devastation and there were still terrible famines throughout the 1930s.

There is an awesome amount of documented history about Hitler’s prostate and weak Nazi Germany having been rearmed by US Corporations for War on Russia.

America’s Wealthy Put Their Money Where Hitler’s Mouth Was

By their intense investing and joint venturing to arm Germany to the teeth, America’s wealthy were, albeit mostly silently, showing a positive attitude regarding Hitler’s announced hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils, communism and Judaism.

So why had Soviet leaders and writers — even during the onslaught of much vile, unfair and unfounded anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War after the Second World War — never managed to hold the Western colonizing powers, the United States in particular, responsible for the Second World War in having rearmed Germany, intending (as Hitler had threatened) the destruction of the USSR? This has remained a mystery to this archival research peoples historian, all efforts contacting various well known historians in the field of recent Russian history in the US, and some in Russia notwithstanding. All the investments and joint venturing of US (and European) corporations building up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to the world’s number one military in only six years are documented in both business and tax records of US, Germany and other nations, and are in great part documented on the Internet with quite comprehensive statistics, a modest but indicting amount of which are presented in this article.

Below are excepts from British American scholar Anthony B. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Chapter One – “Wall Street Paves the Way for Hitler.” (Anthony Sutton was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973.) and an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles.)

The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities. For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline. Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I.G. Farben, Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil — of which 85 percent was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process.

Germans were brought to Detroit to learn the techniques of specialized production of components, and of straight-line assembly. The techniques learned in Detroit were eventually used to construct the dive-bombing Stukas. I.G. Farben representatives in this country enabled a stream of German engineers to visit not only plane plants but others of military importance. Contemporary American business press confirm that business journals and newspapers were fully aware of the Nazi threat and its nature.

The evidence presented suggests that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) — with full awareness that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.

Synthetic gasoline and explosives (two of the very basic elements of modern warfare), the control of German World War II output was in the hands of two German combines created by Wall Street loans under the Dawes Plan.

The two largest tank producers in Hitler’s Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A.G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry.

General Motors supplied Siemens & Halske A.G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. As late as 1940, Bendix Aviation supplied complete technical data to Robert Bosch for aircraft and diesel engine starters and received royalty payments in return.

In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note ” that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were — except for the Ford Motor Company — controlled by the Wall Street elite — the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan Bank.

FDR Was Fully Aware His Cronies Were Investing in Hitler’s Military

President Roosevelt had to have been aware that many of his cronies and most of his peers among the wealthy owners of America’s corporations were investing and joint venturing head over heels in and with Nazi Germany.

The Nazi Counsel for the Defense at the Standard Oil Spoke an Embarrassing Truth

The deception fostered in Wall Street war investors owned press and TV that the white people of the American, English, French and other racist European colonial empires were good guy heroes during the Second World War has been pervasive and universal. Even the outcry of the German Counsel for the Defense in his summation at the major Nuremberg trial, heard by the audience of millions that saw the block buster American documentary movie Judgement at Nuremberg, (with Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy and Marlena Dietrich) seems to have made little impression. Actor Maximilian Schell, in defense of the Nazis on trial, shouts:

Your Honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not hear the words of Hitler’s broadcast all over the world? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world?

Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?

How many moviegoers are shocked when they hear: “American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?”

Amazingly, in this American made movie, the German Counsel for the Defense is seen making the case that seventy to eighty-five million men, women and children didn’t die because of Adolph Hitler. They perished because the wealthy in the US and Western Europe empowered Hitler to make war.

The only plausible answer as to why Russians haven’t openly and logically held the United States responsible for the Second World War and the genocidal Nazi invasion of their country is their shame for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed only days before the Second World War began.

However, given the obviousness of the colonial powers heavily arming Nazi Germany under such a pathetic and oft repeated excuse as to make Nazi Germany a ‘bulwark against the communist Soviet Union,’ and then refusing all entreaties of the Soviets to form a protective alliance in the face of Hitler’s ever increasing power and belligerence, Stalin’s surprise signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Nazi Germany seems to have been a last resort defense of Russia.

Were the Soviets to wait for Hitler’s attack, prepared by US, UK and France’s rearming of Germany in open violation of the prohibitions in the Versailles Treaty, after allowing Hitler’s illegal warplanes to bomb Spain?

Stalin Had Warned World War Was Already Ongoing in Europe and Asia

Four days before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbenthrop pact Stalin warned that World War was already ongoing in Europe and Asia. In his speech at 18th Convention of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, Stalin not only cruelly analyzed and exposed the policy of “non-intervention” and encouraging aggressors for what it was, but warned the world that

a new imperialist war was already in progress since 1935, and had already involved over 500 million people in Ethiopia, Spain, China, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The war has created a new situation with regard to the relations between countries. It has enveloped them in an atmosphere of alarm and uncertainty. By undermining the basis of the postwar peace regime and overriding the elementary principles of international law, it has cast doubt on the value of international treaties and obligations. Pacifism and disarmament schemes are dead and buried. Feverish arming has taken their place. Everybody is arming, small States and big States, including primarily those which practice the policy of non-intervention. Nobody believes any longer in the unctuous speeches which claim that the Munich concessions to the aggressors and the Munich agreement opened a new era of ‘appeasement’. They are dis-believed even by the signatories to the Munich agreement, Britain and France, who are increasing their armaments no less than other countries.

The US Ambassador to the USSR Witnessed Russian Awakening to the Ultimate Goal of the Colonial Powers in Arming and Promoting Nazi Germany

In his book Mission to Moscow, the US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, Joseph Davies, chronicles the desperation of the Russians in 1937, unable to get a defensive alliance with England and France and fully aware of the rearming of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty was directed at the Soviet Union and most obviously not meant to be only a ‘bulwark.’

A US pro-Soviet film, Mission to Moscow, staring Walter Huston was made by Warner Bros. in 1943 in response to a request by President Roosevelt, and made specifically to improve Soviet-American relations. Because of the surprise non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin is credited with having foreseen the danger Hitler was capable of, though not that Stalin had derailed, for the moment, the West’s plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. A New York Times movie critic wrote,

With a boldness unique in film ventures …, it comes out sharply and frankly for an understanding of Russia’s point of view. It says with a confident finality that Russia’s leaders saw, when the leaders of other nations dawdled, that the Nazis were a menace to the world. (Mission to Moscow, starring Walter Huston, Ann Harding in Hollywood. Bosley Crowther, New York Times, April 30, 1943.)

All the War Crimes Committed During WWII Were Made Possible by the Rearming of Germany

All the inhuman, monstrous beyond description Nazi-German crimes, the crimes that have been attributed to Stalin and those committed by the US and Britain in fire bombing civilians in German and Japanese cities, happened during the world war that was made possible by the enthusiastic rearming of Nazi Germany. This was done to protect and continue invested capital rule over most of humanity by the unjustly wealthy in the Western colonial empires which were then threatened by the Great Depression that had been created by their own financial malfeasance. The true source of the Second World War was American industrial might that empowered Hitler and his Nazi thugs in what had been a disarmed Germany. Hitler’s strident call for Germany to expand into the Soviet Union was silently or tacitly approved as was much of Hitler’s rabid condemnation of Jews by Americans investing and joint venturing in Nazi Germany. This economic facilitation of a Second World War equally would come to mean an economic facilitation of a multi-nation Holocaust.

When we recall films and photos of skies filled with warplanes, of seas filled with warships and of thousands of tanks engaged in deadly conflict on land bringing death, destruction and misery to millions of innocent men, women and children, we ought to best remember, as well, that a lot of upper-class people in business suits were elatedly counting their enormous blood-soaked profits from investments in the manufacture of weapons, munitions, uniforms, and coffins while the Wall Street-owned USA, became the world’s single superpower and the cities of its designated enemy, the USSR, lay half in ruins, 27 million of its citizens dead.

May 9th or Victory Day is a holiday in Russia that commemorates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. It was first inaugurated in the 16 republics of the Soviet Union, following the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender late in the evening on 8 May 1945.

The Red Army Had Shattered the Nazi Wehrmacht at Great Human Cost but Western Media Has Continued to Falsify History that the USA Defeated Nazi Germany During the Second World War

As early as June 1942 the Soviet Union had urged its American and British allies to open a second front in Western Europe. It would take the US and UK another two years to finally launch the invasion of France. Meanwhile, the Red Army took the brunt of German military might and millions died in the genocidal race war waged by the Nazis on the Eastern Front.[207]

The German defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, in the war against Nazi Germany overall, and of the entire Second World War. German and Axis casualties were enormous: 68 German, 19 Romanian, 10 Hungarian and 10 Italian divisions were mauled or destroyed. That represented 43% of Axis forces in the east. After Stalingrad, the Red Army had the initiative, and the Wehrmacht was in retreat. Germany’s Sixth Army had ceased to exist, and the armed forces of Germany’s European allies, except Finland, had been shattered. In a speech on 9 November 1944, Hitler himself blamed Stalingrad for Germany’s impending doom. The destruction of an entire army, the largest killed, captured, wounded figures for Axis soldiers, during the war, and the foiling of Germany’s grand strategy gave the battle at Stalingrad global significance.

Meanwhile British and US Had Been Engaged in Peripheral Fighting with the Enemy.

While at Kursk in Russia 6,000 tanks and more than 2,000,000 men battled, on July 9, 1943, an American seaborne assault by the U.S. 7th Army involving 150,000 troops, 3,000 ships and 4,000 aircraft landed on the southern coast of Sicily.

A Very Belated D-Day Operation Overlord at Normandy June 6, 1944!

A fleet of some 6,900 vessels landed the assault forces of slightly more than 156,000 men, Americans, British and Canadians on five beaches, About 24.000 airborne troops were deployed By the time the Allies did open this Western front in Normandy in June of 1944, the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany had already been established by the Red Army victories at Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943) and Kursk (July-August 1943) the year before. At Stalingrad Germany had lost its Sixth Army and four allied armies of over 400,000 men. Meanwhile, at Kursk Germany had lost thirty divisions (over 500,000 men) including seven Panzer divisions equipped with the new Panther and Tiger tanks, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 guns and 3,500 warplanes.Thus, while the war was being won and whole German armies destroyed at great human cost to the Soviet Red Army during the month of July at Kursk, the Americans, British and Canadians in the same month had been invading a weakly defended Sicily.

In actual fact the Normandy invasion was not a significant contributor to Germany’s defeat. A small US/British/Canadian/French force of about 150,000 soldiers of which about 73,000 were American faced a few German divisions at half strength and short of fuel and ammo. The real war was on the Eastern front where millions of soldiers had been fighting for several years.

The Red Army won World War II. The cost to the Soviets was between 9 million and 11 million military deaths. Adding in the Russian civilian deaths, the Soviet Union won the war at the cost of between 22 million and 27 million Soviet lives. In contrast the US had 405,000 soldiers killed during WW II of which 111,600 died fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. (“D-Day Normandy Invasion after 75 Years. The Falsification of History,” Paul Craig Roberts, Global Research, 6/7/ 2019)

Throughout most of World War II, the U.S. and the British faced 10 German divisions combined. The Soviets were facing more than 200 German divisions. The Germans lost approximately 1 million men on the Western front. They lost 6 million on the Eastern front. There is reason why Churchill said the Red Army tore the guts out of the German war machine. However, that’s not what Americans learn. (Peter Kuznick, “Mythology of America as Liberator,” The Real News Network, 6/9/2019)

The success of the Allies after Normandy was largely due to the Germans having been already weakened badly because of the pummeling they had taken from the Russian Army, and were at the time of the D Day landing, in retreat across Europe ahead of the vast Red Army, which was then liberating the concentration camps. Majdanek on July 22–23, later that summer the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers.

By the time Allied troops came ashore on June 6, 1944 the Russians had already fought three years of devastating war on the Eastern Front, taking and inflicting appalling casualties. The enormous and pivotal battles of Stalingrad and Kursk had been fought and won.

Operation Bagration – the Soviet destruction of German Army Group Centre – was, arguably, the single most successful military action of the entire war. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in Normandy, and it is symptomatic of the lack of public knowledge about the war in the East that whilst almost everyone has heard of D-Day, few people other than specialist historians know much about the Soviet Operation Bagration. Yet the sheer size of Bagration dwarfs that of D-Day. Despite the recent Allied landing at Normandy, the German army retained over 235 divisions in the East, in comparison with roughly 85 in the West. On January 27, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz.

On every June 6 since 1944, leaders of the US, UK and France join in public observance of the D Day Normandy invasion in taking credit for the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. This is the Colonial Powers, or ‘Free World’ or ‘Community of Nations’ version of history. According to this Western media popularized version of history, the Red Army merely helped Americans and British win the war

The CIA overseen corporate media conglomerates of the Western World Powers [230C] have not only falsified a USA-UK victory over Nazi Germany, but have given the world a false picture of an initially powerless criminally bankrupt Adolph Hitler.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jay Janson.

US-China war over Taiwan would be biggest since WWII, Australian expert says

Bt RFA Staff — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 07:46:00 +0000

The United States cannot win a war against China over Taiwan, four Australian defense experts have said in a series of interviews conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The national broadcaster carried out the interviews with “four of Australia’s most experienced military strategists” who all “have held the highest security clearances that it’s possible to have” and have been involved in sensitive military operations.

Their opinions differ somewhat from a wargame developed by the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C., in which American strategists said a U.S.-led coalition would defeat an invasion by China and maintain an autonomous Taiwan.

CSIS’s ‘The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan’ launched early January also predicted that China would also suffer “high losses” that might destabilize Chinese Communist Party rule, even if Taiwan’s economy would be left shattered and the U.S. global position would also be damaged for many years.

‘A costly stalemate’

Hugh White, former Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Australian Department of Defence, said that a war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan would "probably be the biggest and most disruptive war the world has seen since 1945" as it would swiftly escalate into a full-scale regional maritime war.

The expert said America would neither be able to force Beijing to concede over Taiwan without using nuclear weapons nor be willing to risk Chinese nuclear retaliation for Taiwan's sake.

“I do not think there is any credible chance that America, with or without Australia's support, could win a war with China over Taiwan,” White said, adding that it would be a mistake for the U.S., and Australia, to get involved in such a war.

According to him, “by far the most likely outcome would be a costly stalemate in which both sides lost heavily but neither side could secure a decisive, war-winning advantage.”

A Taiwanese tank in regular combat training, Feb. 2023. Credit: Taiwan Ministry of Defense

Another analyst, Allan Behm, former head of the International Policy and Strategy Divisions of the Defence Department, shared a similar view.

“Were the U.S. and China to go to war over the next five to 10 years, the best scenario one might envisage for the U.S. is a stalemate,” Behm said.

However, given the rate at which the Chinese forces are developing, “a Chinese victory over the U.S. is the more likely outcome beyond 2035,” the expert warned.

Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer with the Australian Army Intelligence Corps and now a professor at the University of New South Wales, said that in his opinion, President Joe Biden “will avoid a direct confrontation with China.”

"He would rather support Taiwan and enlist countries around the world in sanctioning or condemning China,” Fernandes said.

Cross-strait invasion or blockade?

Among war scenarios, a blockade of Taiwan may be more likely than a conventional invasion, according to the Australian experts.

It would be “a far cheaper and less risky way” for Beijing to achieve its objectives by establishing “a credible air and sea exclusion zone around Taiwan, and thereby put immense pressure on the Taiwanese to accept Beijing’s terms,” said Hugh White.

Annual Han Kuang drills in southern Taiwan, July, 2022. Credit: RFA

Allan Behm predicted a China-U.S. war over Taiwan “would begin as an air-sea war, with China seeking to impose punitive costs on the U.S. Navy and such U.S. Air Force units as were able to operate.”

“Assuming that China was eventually able to control the Taiwan Strait, it would deploy land forces to Taiwan … and then to occupy the country," he said.

Behm also warned that the impact on Australia of a war with China would be "profoundly and devastatingly different" from any other war since World War II.

Meanwhile, Clinton Fernandes said a blockade, when 80% of ships and aircraft are unable to pass, would be the most likely option.

“It means mine laying by air and naval units, particularly submarines, blockading ports, inspecting maritime traffic including commercial shipping, intercepting aircraft, and attacking adversary military forces as necessary,” he said.

"China's leaders could discreetly offer negotiations to Taiwan's leaders during a blockade before the risky step of ordering an amphibious invasion," said Fernandes.

Anti-landing drills in Pingtung, southern Taiwan, in July, 2022. Credit: RFA

Adm. (Ret.) Chris Barrie, former Chief of the Defence Force, forewarned that a war between U.S. and China is “likely to impoverish us all, it may even kill most of us if it goes nuclear".

"The fundamental assumption that we could win a war against China is wrong-headed and hawkish,” he said.

"Australia should use all the means at its disposal to avert a war with China,” the retired admiral added.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Bt RFA Staff.

Chinese sportswear brand apologizes after fashion likened to Japanese WWII uniforms

By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 15:45:25 +0000

Chinese sportswear brand Li-Ning has apologized after some of its latest fashion clothing sparked public anger in China over a perceived resemblance to Japanese World War II military uniforms.

The company, founded by retired Olympic gymnast and billionaire Li Ning, made the statement after being deluged with complaints that its "Chasing Dreams Airport Collection" of down khaki parkas, hats and hoodies looked like vintage Japanese uniforms.

Some items from the Sept. 20 fashion shoot were slammed as copies of Japanese war-time clothing, with users posting photos side-by-side for comparison.

The company described the collection, which included hats with earflaps commonly associated with Japanese uniforms, as being inspired by "ancient Chinese helmets."

"Li-Ning sincerely apologizes for the perplexity and doubt caused by some of the products in its Chasing Dreams collection, the design and appearance of which have sparked online discussions in recent days," the company said in a statement on its official Weibo account.

"The Chasing Dreams collection took aviation as its theme, finding inspiration in the clothing worn by pilots, to show how humanity continues to search the skies for its dreams," the statement said.

"The inspiration from the pilot hat that sparked the most discussion came from an ancient Chinese helmet," Li-Ning said. "We will continue to listen carefully to people's feedback and suggestions."

The statement didn't appease everyone on Weibo, however.

"Shouldn't the very first words be an apology?" @Big_head_girl_one commented, while @I_met_you_in_my_dream said it was an unacceptable response from a native of Nanjing, whose elderly population still remember the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 cases of rape.

"As a native of Nanjing, I can't accept this ... because I keep hearing the older generation talk about their experiences in that year," the user wrote.

"I'm never buying Li-Ning again," added @warm_winter_sun_cf566, while @small_windy_mud commented: "Speechless."

Trolls at work?

Others, however, thought the complaints were far-fetched, and the work of trolls.

"It's like people who can't tell the difference between a Nazi [swastika] and a Buddhist [manji] criticizing Buddhists for using Nazi symbols," @Yuanxi_21711 commented, while @half_a_catty_and_eightyli said the clothing looked nothing like Japanese uniforms.

"This isn't a standard Japanese flight suit -- the shape and color are different," the user wrote. "Is Li Ning being trolled by his opponents?"

Ho Tsung-hsun, chairman of the Taiwan Citizen Participation Association, said the "fragility" of online comments were linked to Beijing's authoritarian brand of nationalism.

"This isn't the first time this has happened and it won't be the last," Ho told RFA. "If they hadn't apologized, their business and public image could be affected."

"This is a dictatorship, and its people are so fragile."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

Biden Says Nukes in Ukraine ‘Would Change the Face of War Unlike Anything Since WWII’

Common Dreams staff — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 12:12:56 +0000

In an interview with 60 Minutes set to air Sunday night, President Joe Biden says that his clear advice to Russian President Vladimir Putin if he is "considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons" in Ukraine, would be this: "Don't. Don't. Don't."

The question was asked by news correspondent Scott Pelley, who described a current state of affairs in which Putin, after nearly 9 months of protracted war and recent gains by a Ukrainian counter-offensive, is feeling "embarrassed and pushed into a corner."

Asked what he would do in response to any kind of nuclear strike, Biden said, "You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course I'm not going to tell you." But, he added, "It'll be consequential."

Such a move, said Biden, "would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II."

The comments from Biden come just days after a new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs warned that a continued buildup of conventional military by the U.S. and other European allies in Ukraine increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.

"Russian aggression in Ukraine requires an international response. However, it does not justify increased U.S. military budgets, which could ultimately escalate tensions with Russia and once again lead us down a dangerous path," said Costs of War Project co-director Stephanie Savell.

Instead of increasing the flow of weapons into Ukraine, the paper advises "de-escalatory approaches" to end the war unleashed by Putin's invasion. Such measures should include "direct talks, reviving the arms control agenda, and pursuing military confidence-building measures between NATO countries and Russia."

In a series of tweets late last week, Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, said she was deeply troubled by the way journalists and analysts throw around the term "tactical nuclear weapons" without putting them in their proper context.

"Whether or not the risk is high or low, when we describe what Russian use of nuclear weapons would do in Ukraine, we have to mention that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would die," Fihn tweeted on Thursday. "Even if it stopped with one bomb, it would be an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe."

"This to me," she added, "is one of the main problems of many nuclear analysts. It is detached from reality and real people, and only talks about abstract strategy and theory. It's how we desensitize decision-makers and the public, and make the use nuclear weapons sound normal and acceptable."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Common Dreams staff.

Solomon Islands marking 80 years of WWII Battle of Guadalcanal

APR editor — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 21:57:30 +0000

RNZ Pacific

Senior government and military leaders from the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Japan are in Honiara to mark the 80th anniversary of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal.

Minister of Defence Peeni Henare is leading the New Zealand delegation along with Secretary of Defence Andrew Bridgman and the Commander of the Joint Forces Rear Admiral James Gilmour.

The New Zealand High Commissioner to Solomon Islands, Jonathan Schwass, said New Zealanders from the army, air force and navy “served with distinction in the Solomon Islands between 1942 and 1945”.

“As WWII starts to slip beyond living memory, it is important that we continue to honour people of all nationalities who served and who died here,” he said.

Schwass said the remembrance ceremonies being organised this weekend showed that they were not forgotten.

A series of commemoration events start today.

Schwass said they were a reminder that the ties between New Zealand and Solomon Islands went back far into the past.

Solomon Scouts and CoastWatchers Trust chair Sir Bruce Saunders said filming the stories of those who served the US Marine Forces when they landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942 was under way.

He said Solomon Islands students did not know their own history and he hoped to change that.

Marines rest in the field on Guadalcanal. Image: WikiCommons/RNZ

More than 25,000 soldiers died in the battle including dozens of Solomon Islanders.

Sir Bruce said the stories of their grandfathers and their role in saving their country needed to be passed down.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Next Stop Advanced Base … US Marines leaving New Zealand for Guadalcanal. Sergeant James A. Mundell wrote: “No band plays as these Marines board their war-bound transport.” 30 June 1943. Image: Nga Taonga/RNZ

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The WWII displacement story that inspires this mom and son #WorldRefugeeDay

International Rescue Committee — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 13:18:35 +0000

This content originally appeared on International Rescue Committee and was authored by International Rescue Committee.

Idaho’s ‘wind rush’ meets opposition outside a WWII prison camp

Lina Tran — Mon, 23 May 2022 10:45:00 +0000

In 1942, when Mary Abo was 2 years old, the U.S. government arrested her father and took the rest of the Abo family from Juneau, Alaska, to the Minidoka prison camp in the desert of south-central Idaho. The United States had just entered World War II. The five members of the Abo family spent the next three years in the sprawling, barbed wire-enclosed camp, where Mary briefly attended nursery school before convincing her mother to keep her in the barracks during the day. In 1945, as World War II drew to a close and after the Supreme Court ruled that detaining “loyal citizens” was unconstitutional, the family reunited in Juneau, and her father re-opened his cafe.

Decades later, Mary and her older sister Alice returned to Minidoka, a historic site now managed by the National Park Service. Alice had been reluctant to make the trip, but as the sisters sat on the stoop of the barracks, like they once did as children, she admitted it had been a good, although difficult, visit. They leaned into the wind, sweet with sage, that kicked dust into their eyes and brought memories from the past. “It’s flat as far as you can see,” Mary said. “The only thing you can hear is the wind that whistles. We need that silence.”

Now, the two sisters, Mary’s daughter, and scores of other Japanese Americans with ties to Minidoka fear the quiet and open plains may be broken. Last August, Magic Valley Energy, a subsidiary of the New York-based private equity firm LS Power, proposed building the 1,000-megawatt Lava Ridge Wind Project on 76,000 acres in and around historic Minidoka, mostly public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s the second time Minidoka has crossed paths with LS Power, whose plans to construct 400 towering wind turbines would more than double Idaho’s wind energy output.

Lava Ridge is the kind of development that the Biden administration wants to see more of: renewable energy on federal lands. To meet his goal for a carbon-free grid by 2035, President Joe Biden wants to permit 25,000 megawatts of new land-based renewable energy ventures in the next three years. The Bureau of Land Management thinks it’s uniquely positioned to help, and has started a process to make federal land leases cheaper for solar and wind energy developers. But in the high desert of Idaho, these forces have drawn clean energy companies to what Minidoka survivors and their descendants consider sacred ground.

“It’s not just a historic site,” said Robyn Achilles, executive director of Friends of Minidoka, the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. “This is about people. The site is about respecting and honoring the memory of our friends and family who suffered from this unconstitutional mass incarceration.”

A Minidoka survivor and her granddaughter, an NPS park ranger, tour the park’s newly opened visitor’s center in Feb. 2020. National Park Service/Richard Alan Hannon

Two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, the government began imprisoning some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, more than 13,000 of them at Minidoka. Minidoka was one of 10 such prison camps, the locations of which were chosen because they were remote and could be developed for agriculture. More than two-thirds of the imprisoned were American citizens, while many of the others had lived in the U.S. for decades but were denied eligibility for naturalized citizenship. Since there were so many incarcerees — too many to transport by bus — the government placed the camps near railroad lines.

Coming from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, many incarcerees found Idaho to be an unfamiliar, punishing land. David Sakura, who was born in western Washington and imprisoned at 7 years old, calls it “America’s Siberia.” While his father was serving with the Military Intelligence Service at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, Sakura was weaving through sagebrush with his mother and little brothers, watching for rattlesnakes as they made their way to picnic in the shade of the looming guard tower. (There were so many rattlesnakes that every year, men made a contest of hunting them down.)

David Sakura (far left) with his family at Minidoka. Courtesy of David Sakura

Today, the land surrounding Minidoka attracts wind developers because the same railways that ferried prisoners to Idaho run along transmission lines that can shuttle electricity across western states. And it’s mostly farms and fields — a legacy of the Japanese Americans who cleared, irrigated, and started farming the land.

Dan Sakura, the son of David Sakura and a conservation consultant for the Friends of Minidoka, said southern Idaho is seeing a “wind rush.” According to Sakura, the region, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management’s Shoshone Field Office, has lax land-use rules, since the region’s management plan hasn’t been updated in 36 years, making it among the oldest in the country. Whereas current plans have guidance for managing visual resources, like striking plants, unique rock formations, and rich colors in soil and rock, there’s no such rules in the old plan. Besides Lava Ridge, Magic Valley Energy recently proposed a second project next door in Twin Falls County, and there’s another underway north of that. The National Park Service estimates that 324 of the 400 proposed wind turbines — each, at up to 740 feet tall, taller than the Washington monument — would be visible from Minidoka’s visitor center, encroaching on almost a third of the view.

This isn’t the first time that the Friends of Minidoka have taken on LS Power. In 2009, the private company wanted to build a transmission line that would have cut right through the national park site. The Friends of Minidoka and the National Park Service fought back, and the line was ultimately rerouted. So last August, when the Bureau of Land Management published its intent to evaluate the wind proposal, the nonprofit was surprised to learn that Magic Valley Energy had come up with a project that they feel threatens Minidoka.

Luke Papez, the project director, said Magic Valley Energy did, in fact, have the Friends of Minidoka in mind when they developed their proposal; that’s why they planned to put the turbines as far as they did from the park. “Since then, we are now understanding that even with that amount of offset, there remains concerns,” Papez said. “We are happy to hear those concerns out and see what can be done.”

Minidoka under construction in 1942. National Archives

In a letter inviting community members to participate in the federal land agency’s public comment period last fall, Wade Vagias, the National Park Service superintendent of Minidoka, said that the facility — with its new roads, substations, and transmission towers — would damage the site’s historical integrity. “The isolated and undeveloped setting was a defining characteristic of the unjust incarceration experience at Minidoka,” he wrote. The project “would fundamentally change the psychological and physical feelings of remoteness and isolation one experiences when visiting Minidoka NHS.”

Dan Sakura and other Minidoka survivors and their descendants have asked the federal government to find a new site for the wind farm. An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency “is reviewing the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Energy project with broad partner and stakeholder engagement that includes Japanese Americans interested in potential impacts to Minidoka, Tribes, and the National Park Service,” referring to tribes including the Shoshone-Bannock, which have said the development would violate their off-reservation treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather.

Sakura said that he and other members of his organization support clean energy. “We’re not like billionaires on Cape Cod that don’t like to look at wind turbines,” he said. He recognizes the pressing threat of climate change, but characterized their fight against Lava Ridge as a matter of protecting their heritage.

Mary Abo’s husband looks at a memorial to the 4,000 Issei, or Japanese immigrants, incarcerated at Minidoka. National Park Service/Richard Alan Hannon

When the government began shutting down the camps in 1945, it handed out pamphlets with tips for a “successful relocation,” advising people to avoid gathering in big groups or speaking Japanese in public. “That experience of living in camp made them feel ashamed and less worthy,” said Achilles, whose parents both survived imprisonment. “Those things contributed to how survivors behaved after camp and how they raised their children. So we see it in the second, third, and fourth generations.”

For those who found it too painful to speak about their time in camp, annual pilgrimages to Minidoka offer an opportunity to share memories, seek community, and heal. They think wind turbines would disrupt the solemnity of the site, as well as diminish the park’s educational mission. Minidoka illuminates the fragility of civil rights and an ugly chapter of racism in U.S. history — a lesson as relevant as ever, they say, amid rising reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Eighty years since it was built, Minidoka remains isolated. Dwarfed by vast desert and distant mountains, visitors get a glimpse of what it might have been like to be imprisoned there.

Papez said that Magic Valley Energy is eager to find a collaborative solution. “We do not want to have a project that devalues, in any way, the importance of that site,” he said. “We do feel that there’s a solution here that can respect the Japanese American community’s connection to Minidoka that still allows for this important renewable energy facility to be able to make its contributions going forward.”

Magic Valley Energy has already moved the wind farm’s location before: Two potential sites were dismissed largely because they’re important habitats for the declining greater sage-grouse.

Historic barrack and mess hall at Minidoka National Historic Site in present day. National Park Service/Stan Honda.

The Bureau of Land Management is currently putting together its environmental impact statement, the draft of which is expected this summer. In the fall, the agency plans to release the final version, with a decision to follow soon after. It could approve or deny Magic Valley Energy’s proposal, or offer an alternative arrangement, like one farther from Minidoka, with fewer or shorter turbines.

To David Sakura, the wind project is much too close. One of the turbines would stand about a mile from his old barracks, 15-8-E. To this day, he remembers the address; children committed them to memory so they wouldn’t get lost in the maze of buildings.

“Minidoka is a sacred place where our spirits come back and speak to us,” Sakura said. “We would like to preserve that and make sure that our children, our children’s children, and our great-grandchildren will be able to speak with the spirits that are left behind in Minidoka.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Idaho’s ‘wind rush’ meets opposition outside a WWII prison camp on May 23, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lina Tran.

Mariupol Worse Than WWII Siege Of Leningrad, Says Ukrainian Holocaust Survivor

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Mon, 02 May 2022 17:57:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Sanders Intros Revival of 95% Windfall Profits Tax From WWII to Curb Corporate Greed

Jessica Corbett — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 20:46:32 +0000

"We cannot allow big oil companies and other large, profitable corporations to continue to use the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the specter of inflation to make obscene profits by price gouging Americans."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

WWII Redux: The Endpoint of U.S. Policy, from Ukraine to Taiwan

John V. Walsh — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:58:35 +0000

The Threatened Peoples of East Asia and Europe Can Stop the U.S. Drive to Restore its Global Domination. “This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the More

The post WWII Redux: The Endpoint of U.S. Policy, from Ukraine to Taiwan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John V. Walsh.

WWII Redux: The Endpoint of U.S. Policy from Ukraine to Taiwan

John V. Walsh — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 01:39:52 +0000

“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.

It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.

Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of the great Eurasian land mass: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.” We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind WWII which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.

The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China which are the targeted nations. Let us be clear at the outset. As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the U.S. to do battle with Russia or China but to watch China and Russia fight it out with the neighbors to the ruin of both sides. The US is to “lead from behind’ – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.

To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the U.S. Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the U.S. Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.

Why should the U.S. Elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective? Why the steady eastward march of NATO since the end of the first Cold War? The goal of the U.S. is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the number one power on the planet, eclipsing all others.

This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992. It proclaimed that the U.S.’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….” It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.” It stated frankly “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.” (Emphasis, jw)

The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of U.S. foreign policy since 1941 the year before the U.S. entered WWII. This lineage is documented clearly in the book by the Quicny Institute’s Stephen Wertheim “Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.”

Let us consider China first and then Russia, the foremost target of the U.S., first. China’s economy is number one in terms of PPP-GDP according to the IMF and has been since November, 2014. It is growing faster than the U.S. economy and shows no signs of slowing down. In a sense China has already won by this metric since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.

But what about a military defeat of China? Can the U.S. with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about? The historian, Alfred McCoy, answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no”:

The most volatile flashpoint in Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.

But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. …The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.

Certainly the U.S. Elite recognizes this problem. Do they have a solution?

Moreover, that is not the end of the “problem” for the U.S. There are other powerful countries, like Japan, or rapidly rising economies in East Asia, easily the most dynamic economic region in the world. These too will become peer competitors, and in the case of Japan, it already has been a competitor both before WWII and during the 1980s.

If we hop over to the Western edge of Eurasia, we see that the U.S. has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia. Here too the U.S. cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict nor have U.S. sanctions been able to bring it down. How can the U.S. surmount this obstacle? And as in the case of East Asia the U.S. faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the EU, with Germany at its core. How is the U.S. to deal with this dual threat?

One clue comes in the response of Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine. Biden has said repeatedly that he will not send U.S. combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan. But it will send materiel and weapons and also “advisors.” And here too the U.S. has other peer competitors most notably Germany which has been the target of U.S. tariffs. The economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay, “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”

Such “difficulties for the U.S. were solved once before – in WWII. One way of looking at WWII is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe. In Europe the U.S. was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy. Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.

The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game. The same happened in East Asia with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia. Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe. This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States. As Harry Truman, then a Senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”

At the end of it all the U.S. emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet. McCoy spells it out:

Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.

As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.

The U.S. was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars which are grouped under the heading of WWII.

If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the U.S. “leading from behind,” with material and weapons, who will benefit? And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the U.S. “leading from behind,” who will benefit?

It is pretty clear that such a replay of WWII will benefit the U.S. In WWII while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia. And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the U.S. will emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world. WWII redux.

But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts? The U.S. has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-WWII days. It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.

Are there U.S. policy makers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end? I will leave that to the reader to answer.

The Peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario. And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the U.S. There are clear signs of dissent from the European “allies” of the U.S., especially Germany but the influence of the U.S. remains powerful. Germany and many other countries are after all occupied by tens of thousands of U.S. troops, their media heavily influenced by the U.S. and with the organization that commands European troops, NATO, under U.S. command. Which way will it go?

In East Asia the situation is the same. Japan is the key but the hatred of China among the Elite is intense. Will the Japanese people and the other peoples of East Asia be able to put the brakes on the drive to war?

Some say that a two-front conflict like this is U.S. overreach. But certainly, if war is raging on or near the territories of both Russia and China, there is little likelihood that one can aid the other.

Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than WWII by far. The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.

The post WWII Redux: The Endpoint of U.S. Policy from Ukraine to Taiwan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John V. Walsh.